Maya Particles.. My thoughts. 2005-05-05 - By Eric Lampi
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So I've been working for a couple of days in Maya,
trying to figure out it's particle system.
In a nutshell, it sucks. There are some nice things
about it. The playback is super fast, since it mostly
operates in what we would call "live" mode. Their's
actually works, where as in XSI, well, rarely works
well if at all, and when it does it's not much faster
anyway.
They also have some issues with shaders, some things
need to be rendered in Hardware.. or software.. It's
not all that clear to me.
The forces at first seem to work quite well right
away. Often in XSI you apply a force, and it doesn't
do much, or the results are not very good.
I was amused to see that in order to add variance to
any value, you need to add it as an expression, which
is an incredible waste of time. In general you seem
to have to have a decent scripting background even for
the most basic functions. Overall it's been a
frustrating experience, and Maya in general seems to
be kind of messy. Navigating your emitters forces etc
is much easier. For example, it's simply a matter of
highlighting a force in the list to apply it to an
emitter.
It's nice that you can script functions and
attributes, but I think it's pretty lame to make it
necessary for really basic functions. Which seems to
be the theme in Maya.
So in general, XSI simply needs to improve workflow,
speed, and forces. There are some additonal things I
would address, but those are the biggest as far as I
can see.
I was pretty impressed with the ability to select an
object, add a turbulence force, press play and watch
it drift away. Which is probably the only thing I can
manage to do in 3 clicks in Maya!
E
Freelance 3-D Animator, F/X Artist, Particle Man
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